2022.1

In the XVIII century, the first Lutheran priests arrived from the Saxon city of Halle to the south of Hindustan, in the city of Tranquebar. As employees of the Danish Royal Mission, they worked among pagans, studied their languages, translated texts of Holy Scripture and other Christian literature into local languages, printed these translations in the printing house they established, and taught local children in schools. They regularly sent detailed reports on their work to Germany. In addition to information about the God-pleasing activities of Lutheran pastors, these reports contained detailed information about the region: natural and climatic conditions, political structure, daily lives of the local population, religion and cults, etc. The first years of the mission’s existence in Tranquebar, the main work was conducted under the leadership of Pastor Bartolomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719), who lived in India from 1706 until 1719. In this article, the missionaries’ reports, most of which were compiled by Ziegenbalg, and his letters from India are used as the main sources. The key problem to which the article is devoted is the understanding of the Indian institute of caste by European settlers of the beginning of the XVIII century. The missionaries made attempts to interpret the caste system, comparing it with the traits of the social organization of Europe familiar to them. They did not fully understand the nature of caste and caste ideology. However, they considered the existence of the caste system as the main obstacle to the spread of Christianity in India.

This article is an attempt to re-construct the political biography of Iyās Ibn Ḳabīṣa, one of the chieftains of the Arabic tribe of Ṭayyiʾ, who was at the service of the Sasanids in the late 6th and the early 7th centuries. In the mid-6th century Banū Ṭayyiʾ were included into the sphere of influence of the Lakhmids, the rulers of al-Ḥīra and vassals of the Sasanids. Iyās quickly made his way up and in 578/9 was the interim governor of al-Ḥīra while the Sasanid king was busy selecting a new Lakhmid ruler. Later on, Iyās was involved in war against Byzantium at the north-western borders of the Sasanid empire. An important episode of Iyās’ career took place in 591 when Iyās and his fellow tribesmen assisted Sasanid king Chosroes II (591–628) in fleeing from the rebellious general Warahrān Chūbīn. Apparently as a reward Chosroes appointed Iyās his governor of ʿAyn al-Tamr. Iyās, formally inferior to the Lakhmid king in rank, behaved rather independently and even could threaten the latter with an armed clash. Following the dismissal of al-Nuʿmān III, the last Lakhmid king (579–601), Chosroes appointed Iyās governor of al-Ḥīra (602). Iyās was able to consolidate his power, but in the same year lost the battle of dhū Ḳār. Fearing punishment, he misinformed Chosroes about the outcome of the battle and fled. Chosroes dismissed Iyās and discontinued the practice of appointing Arab rulers of al-Ḥīra.

In October 2014, mass protests began in Ouagadougou, triggered by the constitutional reform in Burkina Faso, which suggests the possibility of extending the term of the incumbent President Blaise Compaoré in power and his nomination in the 2015 elections. The parliamentary meeting to consider the constitutional amendments was scheduled for October 30, and on the same day the representative of the protest movement Emil Pargi Par announced that “a Black spring is announced in Burkina Faso, similar to the Arab spring”. The references to the events of the Arab spring by the Burkinan protesters are not accidental – the Arab protests of 2011 really played a big role in the dynamics of socio-political instability around the world, acting as a kind of trigger for a global destabilization wave. In this regard, it seems relevant to study the forms and methods of the influence of the events of the Arab spring on the Black spring in Burkina Faso.

This work examines the Islamic political movements in Algeria from its independence in 1962 to the end of the Civil War (1992–1999). The author argues that the examined period is divided into two parts: before and after the legalization of multiparty system in 1989. The author highlights the characteristics of existing organizations representing political Islam: structure, strategy for achieving their goals, and relationship with the state. Special attention is paid to the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), as the first mass Islamic organization that had a deep impact on the future of religion in Algeria’s political life. The comparison of two stages is made as the conclusion: both common features and differences are presented.

The article examines foreign policy settings that Islamist parties of Pakistan developed during the last three decades of the XXth century. The rise of Islamist forces around the world and the enhancement of their role within the global community, that began at that time, are still going on, in some form or other. In order to better understand this process one will find it beneficial to study the case of Pakistan – the state where Islamists fairly early began to express interest in global politics, having to face rather practical problems in this respect. Pakistani Islamists’ perception of foreign policy was formed at the crosscurrents of two factors under the influence of subjective circumstances, stemming from the specifics of Pakistan as a state. The first factor is the niche occupied by Islamists in Pakistan’s inner politics; the second one is the role ascribed to religion in the development of inter-state connections between Islamabad and the rest of the world. Having determined the contents of these factors as well as their combined influence on the foreign policy perception by Pakistani Islamists, we come to the conclusion that, due to the interdependence between Pakistani authorities and Islamist organisations, the latter focused their attention on the discourses that were in line with official state policy.

The epics of the Turkic peoples have an ancient history. All Turkic dastans, including the very early ones, tell about the people’s struggle for justice, the revival of the motherland, love, spirituality. The people composing the epic had a belief in justice, which can be seen in the victorious ending in all the works. And naturally, the hero, who was the winner in the folk epic, was presented in the form of a strong, courageous and unshakable. For his invincibility, the hero of the Turkic epics always needed supernatural powers. To increase the interest of the unusual, indestructible and courageous hero of the Turkic epics, the creators add unusual information about the birth of the hero. And for this reason, the motive of a miraculous birth is widespread in Turkic dastans. For this reason, starting from the day of the creation of the first Turkish epics, we can say that in all dastans the hero is born in a miraculous way. But over time, the form of such a birth changes. For example, if we compare in the early dastans about the magical birth of Ari Kaan and Oguz Kagan, there are some differences between the birth of heroes in later dastans. If in early dastans we observe the magical birth of a hero in the mother’s womb from a ray of light, a drop of water, one breath, a tree, a skull powder, then in relatively later heroes are born from Gods, demigods who descended from heaven, and you can also observe an unusual birth girls-beloved heroes. In the Middle Ages, during the significant influence of Sufism on the epic, the motive of the miraculous birth of the hero from an ordinary earthling is observed. Although the problem of the poetic hero, his typology in folklore has repeatedly been the object of research, the miraculous birth of the hero and his forms did not stand out as an independent subject of study. In this article, for the first time, they tried to determine the forms of the miraculous birth of the hero, as well as give variants of such a process. In this study, the heroic dastans “Ari Kaan”, “Oguz Kagan”, “Aldai Buuchu”, “Oruzmek”, “Manas”, “Alpamysh”, “Dede Korkud”, “Korogly”, “Tulum Khoja” belonged to these peoples; as well as in the dastans about love “Asli and Kerem”, “Gul Masum”, “Leyli and Majnun”, “Latif Shah”, “Gurbani” both heroic and love motives were analyzed and reunited with the motives of a miraculous birth.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the epistolary novel of the Thai king Rama VI Vajiravudh – the prolific writer who stood at the origins of modern literature of Siam / Thailand. The author correlates the private life of the protagonist with the current political and social changes. Vajiravudh considers the reforms carried out in the kingdom to be a fact of his life. In his novel he shows how the turmoil – sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic – that took place in Thai society at the beginning of the 20th century, influenced the life of an individual. The main problem of the novel is the incompatibility of the cultural codes of the West and the East, Siam in particular. This is precisely the reason for the tragedy of the main hero. The author sees the only way to solve the problem and achieve a harmonious human existence in an era of change – it is the dialogue of cultures and the synthesis of the new European and traditional Thai within the worldview of an individual.

The article studies the images of the ascetic and the king in the literary Sanskrit jātaka. Based on the two “Jātaka-mālās” by Arya Śūra and Haribhaṭṭa (III–IV and IV–V centuries AD respectively) we observe the ambiguity of the image of the king, who can be both righteous and guilty of bad deeds. As well as the image of the ascetic who undergoes transformations in literary jātakas. We have shown that, like the king, the ascetic can be portrayed both as the embodiment of the Buddhist ideal of non-possession, self-restraint and renunciation, and as the antagonist of the hero, sometimes portrayed as a villain. The connection between the archaic image of the gift-granting ascetic and the synthetic image of the pratyekabuddha is traced: he functionally replaces the brahmanical forest ascetic capable of granting boons. It is shown that the assessment of a character does not depend on his status, but on his attitude to bodhisattva in a particular jātaka. The idealized image of both king and ascetic appears as just one of many versions of the same ideal image of a bodhisattva. Buddhist authors adapt for their own purposes the traditional images of the king and ascetic, emphasizing in them only those motives and associated plot moves that correspond to their ideology and creative intention.

The paper deals with some syntactic features of the denominative verbs 㶇 – huáng (*wāŋ) – ‘locust’ / ‘to suffer from locust’, ⯛ – yì (*wek) – ‘epidemic’ / ‘to suffer from an epidemic’, 䴧 – léi (*rhwəj) – ‘thunder’ (like a natural disaster) / ‘to thunder’. The article also proposes a primary classification of situations when there is a need to form a denominative verb. The lexemes are analyzed on the basis of the text corpus of the ancient Chinese period XI BC. – V AD. The nouns 㶇 – huáng (*wāŋ) – ‘locust’, ⯛ – yì (*wek) – ‘epidemic’, 䴧 – léi (*rhwəj) – ‘thunder’ (as natural disaster) in the position of the predicate are not frequent, the percentage does not exceed 20%. For the first time appear in the pre-Han texts (5th century BC). There is a probability of some morphological process (the so-called latent morphology, phonetic-grammatical alternation within one word, not reflected in the writing), involved in the formation of denominatives, such as the reconstructed denominative suffix -s (䚃 – dǎo (*lhu̅́) meaning ‘path’, but dào (*lhu̅ʔ-s) means ‘to lead, to indicate’). Nevertheless, due to the lack of reliable information, this theory also needs further research. In fact, the denominatives 㶇 – huáng (*wāŋ) – ‘to suffer from locusts’, ⯛ – yì (*wek) – ‘to suffer from an epidemic’, 䴧 – léi (*rhwəj) – ‘to thunder’ are formed unmarked, neither phonetically nor morphologically, are intransitive monovalent verbs with similar semantic features.

The paper is dedicated to problems of formation and development of the opposition ‘masculine – feminine’ all the way along the evolution of culture and languages of the ancient and contemporary India. For ancient period of the Indian culture, represented by the phase of Vedas and by the later stage of Brāhmaṇas, the Vedic language and Early Sanskrit were correspondingly the two most important and functionally specified versions of one common language, namely, of the Ancient Indo-Aryan. The Vedic variant of the latter is manifested in texts of Vedas, first of all in Rgveda, while Sanskrit finds its earliest representation in Brāhmaṇas, the prosaic commentaries on Vedas. It was inside those two language versions and groups of texts that the universal theory of mithuná as a system of twin objects filling up the existing universe, was elaborated. In each and every one of mithuná pairs, the participants were internally connected by ritually and sexually important gender-asymmetrical dichotomy of ‘masculine – feminine’. The first, “masculine”, component of this latter opposition was the bearer of the dominant role, while the second was always functioning as a recessive one. This system of mithuná, mirroring the sexual ties between people or anthropomorphic creatures of different genders (specially between gods), was originally active mostly with the animate nouns, but later on, at the epoch of Brāhmaṇas, it has also spread through processes of metaphorization onto the great massive of inanimate substantives. Its role became relevant for the constituents of different linguistic levels – such as, e.g., syllabic structure of lexemes, the set of the typical features of word-classes, the grammatical categories of the word-forms, the associations of nouns with different functional styles, etc. – the concrete samples of the structures of those types are in detail analyzed in the paper. Methodologically the paper is based on combination of the philological method with standard mechanisms of investigating the dead language semantics and also with certain elements of structural linguistics approach. It is also demonstrated in the paper that for contemporary speakers of the New Indo-Aryan languages any ritualistic or cultural values implicated by the ancient concept of mithuná have practically stopped to exist, but the central opposition of ‘masculine – feminine’ and the additional dichotomies like ‘greater – less’ or ‘even – odd’ together with formal means of expressing the corresponding meanings also have been rudimentarily preserved in New Indo-Aryan.

This paper is aimed at analyzing the grammaticalization of unaccusative/unergative opposition in Hindi. The main diagnostic construction which serves to explicate the opposition of unaccusative vs. unergative verbs is passive construction. It will be shown that unaccusative and unergative verbs do not form homogenous classes and may be divided into three groups on the basis of their syntactic and semantic properties. The first class includes initially unaccusative verbs with valency on involitional (animate or inanimate) subjects: girnā ‘fall’. The unaccusative verbs with valency on animate subjects may acquire volitional meaning in special contexts or through metaphorical shifts: marnā ‘die of covid – die for the Motherland’. The second class is made up of initially unergative verbs with agentive animate subjects: bhāgnā ‘run’. Many verbs of this class may also have valency on inanimate subjects. In such cases they acquire involitional meaning: uṭhnā ‘rise’ (about a man – clouds, smoke). The third class consists of verbs that have valency either on volitional (animate) subject or on involitional (animate or inanimate) subject: milnā ‘meet’ (meet with somebody deliberately vs. unexpectedly; be received about money, etc.). Passive transformation in all the three classes is possible only when the verb has volitional meaning. Causative construction can also be used in order to distinguish between unergative and unaccusative verbs: only non-accusative verbs can form causatives with valency on involitional causer. The paper also discusses compound verbs formed by combining the main and the light components. Our analysis of the compatibility of non-accusative and non-ergative verbs in compounds brings to the conclusion that the non-ergative or non-accusative semantics of verbal combinations is always determined by meaning of the main, but not of the light verb.